If, as it’s been reported, Kate Middleton is using hypnobirthing to usher in the royal baby, her delivery scene might look something like this: The Duchess of Cambridge rests languidly, her eyes closed as if in a peaceful slumber. Every so often, on experiencing a “surge,” (the hypnobirthing term for contractions), she’ll breathe along with it, as if being lifted by an ocean wave. Gentle music plays while she relaxes further, visualising herself cradled in the misty hues of a rainbow or her hand gloved in endorphins (good-feeling, pain-numbing hormones) activated by Prince William’s gentle strokes of her arm. Gracefully, she breathes – not pushes – a calm and healthy baby through her body.

It’s a far cry from the way childbirth is often portrayed on TV and in movies, where a writhing-in-pain woman-turned-demon excoriates her petrified husband for doing this horrific thing to her.

Does it have to be so bad? As a young woman, Marie “Micky” Mongan felt sure there was a better way. “Babies didn’t need to come into the world in pain, and their mothers didn’t need to suffer as they did,” says Mongan, who founded HypnoBirthing – The Mongan Method nearly 25 years ago after helping her daughter and two of her daughter’s friends replicate her childbirth experience. “I had four children without a smidgen of pain,” says Mongan, now 80. “I’m not unusual,” she says. “I’m a woman.”

And that’s the starting point for her method, which relies on deep relaxation and powerful affirmations to promise not a pain-free delivery but an easier one. “Our women trust birth. They trust their bodies,” she says. “They’ve been educated to understand it.”

HypnoBirthing experts say it works by shutting down the so-called fight-or-flight response. If a woman heads into labor in fear, her muscles clench, blocking needed blood flow to the birthing muscles. As the baby moves along the birth canal, that tightness creates pain, which begets fear, and the cycle continues.

“What we’re saying is: ‘Mom, stop mentally trying to process this, and just relax, and let it happen.’ And that is what happens. The body opens, and the baby is born the way nature created,” Mongan says. “Many of our babies don’t even cry when they come into the world, because they haven’t experienced birth trauma,” and are more content as a result, she says.

She adds that the calmness of babies born this way has been ascribed to lower stress hormones as well as the common post-delivery practice of “kangaroo care,” in which the newborn is held against the mother’s chest, with skin touching skin. “Many people think it is ‘healthier’ for the baby to cry after birth. However, the transition to the world outside of the womb does not require crying, and a quiet transition is perfectly fine,” Starck says.

As the name implies, hypnobirthing uses hypnosis. For clarification, it’s not voodoo or mind control, but a technique to bring about a deeply relaxed state in which the conscious mind gives way to the subconscious mind, says Lori Nicholson, a Bethesda, Md.-based certified hypnotist and HypnoBirthing practitioner, fertility consultant and infant massage instructor. If you’ve ever zoned out in front of the TV or on your morning commute, you’ve been in a hypnotic state, she says.

By Rachel Pomerance Berl